A Rational Consideration of Recourse to Divine Saints after their Death based on Sadraean Psychological Principles

Although all Islamic denominations agree upon tawassul (recourse to divine saints), they disagree over its limits. Recourse to divine saints after their deaths, and in their life in barzakh, is a controversial issue. Research in this area often tends to be based on transmitted evidence. The present paper considers recourse to divine saints during their life in barzakh in purely rationalistic terms—in terms of Sadraean psychological principles. Prima facie, it seems that some psychological principles of Ṣadrā can be deployed in favor of Wahhabism—in defense of rational impossibility of such recourse. The strong dependence of the soul on the body in the theory of corporeal incipience (al-ḥudūth al-jismānī) of the soul seems to support the Wahhabi theory of “the dead as almost inexistent.” Moreover, the body’s instrumentality for the soul is, prima facie, evidence for their inability to do actions and impossibility of their hearing. On the other hand, multiplicity of the soul’s bodies and the existence of imaginal body in the inferior layer, and in a sense, over the material body, supports the rational possibility of life in barzakh. The idea that the material world is encompassed by the imaginal world (‘ālam al-mithāl), and Mullā Ṣadrā’s account of ultimate human perfection in its union with Active Intellect (al-‘aql al-fa‘‘āl)—rationally enabling any manipulation in the material world regardless of bodies—pave the path for recourse to divine saints in life in barzakh and asking them for help.